We waited for a tragedy

Sunday 5 October 2003 23:00 BST

Even if the outcome of Derren Brown's Russian Roulette was never in serious doubt, the final minutes made gripping, disturbing, television.

At 9.55 last night, the Croydon-born illusionist put a Smith & Wesson revolver to his head and pulled the trigger three times, discharging a fourth empty chamber and the gun's single bullet into a sandbag.

Here was a homegrown attempt to dice with death that knocked David Blaine's pompous, protracted starvation stunt into a cocked top hat.

I'm not sure what such morbid spectacles say about our claim to be civilised but Brown at least had the decency to entertain and to show real fear when mortality stared him in the face. The event hinged on Brown guessing which of the pistol's six hidden, numbered chambers his specially-selected assistant had chosen for the bullet.

The sceptics who scoff at Blaine will no doubt claim the assistant- selection process (which took up a gently amusing 55 minutes) was rigged, or that the final, tense "live" section (subject to a time-delay in case anything went wrong) was fixed.

I have met Brown, though, and he plucked my age and a very unusual name from my head with distressing ease. I believe the stunt was genuine, that he put the gun to his head confident that he could "read" the mind of James, the young man who loaded it. The fact that he got it slightly wrong only increases my conviction.

After firing the empty third chamber at the sandbag, Brown sat frozen, breathing hard, for seconds that seemed like minutes, before snatching up the gun again and hearing a hollow empty "click" at his temple.

He had originally predicted that the fifth, live round was safe. His relief, and that of James, was palpable and genuine. These adrenaline-fuelled moments formed a tiny part of the programme. Most of it consisted of Brown using trickery, his sophisticated psychological techniques, and sheer common sense to whittle down the 12,000 people who had volunteered to load his gun.

Though none of us would say we wanted Derren Brown to die, we have been resentful of the suggestion that he might not. Even Brown's cultivated aura of arrogance was cited as proof that he wasn't really risking his life. They used to say the same about Houdini, who died in 1926 when a stunt went wrong.

I believe Brown really did play Russian Roulette and the fact we tuned into Channel 4 in case it went wrong disturbs me a little. But it was compelling television.